Working with the Microsoft Research Team and Massachusetts General Hospital, Vectorform’s Justin Lankes and Patrick Samona demonstrated the Virtual Colonoscopy Viewer at a recent event in Boston, MA. Virtual Colonoscopy makes it possible to navigate through 3D images of the colon using a multi-touch platform. The goal behind this application is to reduce the time of a typical colonoscopy exam to only 5 minutes. Currently, the procedure takes 40-60 minutes. Virtual Colonoscopy requires a series of clear, high-resolution images to be taken from a CT scanner. Once the pictures are taken, the part of the exam that can be considered by patients to be “invasive” is done! The high-res images are then fed into the application, giving the doctor the opportunity to explore and navigate through the colon, searching for polyps. A standard colonoscopy procedure entails a doctor’s examination of the colon in real time using a fiber optic camera attached to a flexible tube; the tube then gets passed through the rectum. As you can imagine, this can be a long and uncomfortable experience. We hope Virtual Colonoscopy will encourage more people to opt for colon cancer screening, giving us an opportunity to save lives.

Would you like to learn more? Check out Microsoft’s Curt Devlin’s blog post about the application and the demonstration in Boston.

Virtual Colonoscopy will also be demonstrated at the RSNA Conference in November, stay tuned for more updates!

Vectorform, in cooperation with Cook Children’s Health System, has created a suite of applications to assist with Motor Control and Learning for Neurological Rehab. These applications are designed to exercise and evaluate a patient’s motor control. Each application was designed to allow the clinician to manipulate test conditions and tailor the therapy to address the unique needs of each patient.

Cook Children’s Health Systems and specifically Cook Children’s Medical Center in Fort Worth, TX is one of the most well respected children’s hospital in the country. They are on the cutting edge of technology having already acquired five surface units.